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review of Wilkinson EZ Lok tuners
  • Great review! Thanks!

  • The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially
  • Quoting from Sotomayer's dissent (pp 29-30, paragraphing my own):

    This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Kore- matsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting).

    The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world.

    When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

    Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to as- sassinate a political rival? Immune.

    Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.

    Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon?

    Immune. Immune, immune, immune.


    They go on with an incisive critique of the majority's reasoning:

    Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trap- pings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

  • Active communities promotion thread
  • Cheers! Huuuge amount of credit goes to sorrybookbroke and jayjader running their twitch streams every week!

  • Basic thoughts after I recently re-watched the Craig-era Bond Films
  • Dunno. In hindsight it seems its biggest problem was following Casino.

  • Where is the sort method implemented on Vec? (A surprisingly informative question to answer if you're learning rust)

    You've gotta be familiar with Traits to try to work this out.

    Just in case you want to try to work it out your self first

    Gotta say, after hearing that rust is not an OOP/Class-inheritance language, and is strongly and explicitly typed, the Deref trait feels like a helluva drug!

    Obviously it's not the same thing, but working this out definitely had me making a couple of double takes.

    Somewhat awkwardly, I worked it out through the standard lib docs before reading ch 15 of the book (it's more fun this way!).

    And for those who want a quick answer:

    • Read the Deref docs, especially the deref coercion part
    • This allows a variable of a particular type to be implicitly substituted with another variable of a different type.
    • It happens any time a reference is passed in/out of a function, including self in method calls.
      • And obviously requires that Deref be implemented.
    • So sort() isn't implemented on Vec, it's implemented on the slice type ([T]).
    • But Vec implements Deref, substituting [T] for Vec<T> in all function/method calls.
    • Which means Vec gets all of the methods implemented on [T] ... almost like Vec is a subclass of [T]!
    • And yea, OOP people want to abuse this (see, eg, rust-unofficial on anti-patterns)
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    “May have just legalized murder by one individual”: Experts alarmed at “stunning” SCOTUS ruling
  • Well yea, which would be the point. The Other parts of the country's government using their power to impose a limitation (congress and the states).

  • Basic thoughts after I recently re-watched the Craig-era Bond Films
  • More than crushed it!

    I was going to provide a quip along the lines of "If you want to re-watch Skyfall ... you might be better just looking at stills of Roger Deakins' cinematography while listening to Adele's Skyfall theme".

    EDIT: See this wonderful webpage: The Cinematography of Skyfall

  • “May have just legalized murder by one individual”: Experts alarmed at “stunning” SCOTUS ruling
  • How well would a constitutional amendment fly? (I'm not a USian)

    Could a states' rights pitch be made for enshrining some legal limitation on presidential action?

  • Nominate a Film for Fedi Film Club! (July)
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day

    Just because I realised my partner has never seen it, and it's a banger, and about AI, and has a strong female character, it seemed interesting to revisit some 30 odd years later

  • Nominate a Film for Fedi Film Club! (July)

    Please suggest a film for July's "Fedi Film Club"!

    Anything that either you'd like to watch or would recommend to the community.

    Please make sure it's more than a year or two old so that it will (hopefully) be available somewhere.

    And if possible, provide a quick description for why you'd like to watch or why you suggest it.

    ---

    11
    Reddit just isn't how it used to be.
  • Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.

    I'm not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I've gone back, I've definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less "mainstream" platforms though.

  • A cool guide about Latin Phrases you should know
  • That's totally fair! "Exempli gratia" is fairly esoteric. Even as far as latin goes, it's not the most straightforward to translate.

    My general point is though, that "eg" can easily stand for "example given" ... it's such a mainstay of english now, without "exempli gratia" being commonly known at all.

  • Basic thoughts after I recently re-watched the Craig-era Bond Films
  • from the Craig era they all took themselves way too seriously.

    Yea ... I think this is the issue I ran into. For Casino ... and Quantum too, IMO, as a previous hater I'm a defender now ... the seriousness works, it's part of the darker more violent energy. But afterwards, the stories and directing just don't capture that same energy ... so at some point you start to sort of see through what they're trying to do and lose immersion.

  • Basic thoughts after I recently re-watched the Craig-era Bond Films
  • Quantum was meh

    Maybe I was just in a good mood that night ... but seen seeing Quantum and Casino side by side, and then followed by the others, elevated it for me some how. It connected to Casino and ended that arc well enough that I'm now happy to lump it in with Casino as the sort of "optional, not a waste of time" sequel.

  • Basic thoughts after I recently re-watched the Craig-era Bond Films

    I watched them roughly once every night or two. And I'd previously seen them all.

    And I was rather surprised at how I felt about the films afterwards. It seemed really clear that the quality of the films went continuously down after Casino Royal.

    I thought Skyfall would stand out as the best followed by Casino Royal. But, in sequence, nah. Despite having clearly positive qualities, it seemed bloated and empty by comparison.

    I also thought Quantum of Solace would rank pretty low as I recall thinking little of it at the time it came out. Instead, I thought it paired really well with Casino as a great follow up.

    In fact, it felt like the Craig-era was basically Casino + Quantum and "other things". And yea, the "post-Skyfall" films just didn't feel like they were worth the effort. I thought they'd be more passable than they were, but after Casino + Quantum, which, for me, had a real punch and through-line, Spectre + No-Time-to-Die just felt like they were going through the motions and taking up space. At times, they really seemed to be badly flawed. And that's where my impression of Skyfall really hit ... it seemed that was the "what do we do now with this character?" moment and that Skyfall belonged with Spectre etc not the other way round.

    Is this common among Bond fans or am I off base here?

    16
    A cool guide about Latin Phrases you should know
  • Yea, the point of any thing like this would be to provide a better grip on what's going on with these phrases and to break down the opacity of their coming from another language.

    The thing with latin though is that it isn't quite an alien language to english speakers ... so many components of it have ended up in language that an english speaker can kind of "triangulate" some of it.

    The "ad" in "ad hoc", for instance. It's the same "ad" in "advance" or "addition" "admit". And "hoc" is related to English "here". It literally means "toward this (thing)", which takes on the meaning "for the purpose of this thing" ... that is, being "for a specific thing", not "general purpose".

  • A cool guide about Latin Phrases you should know
  • Seems to miss some big ones and providing understanding of them.

    “Et cetera”

    • “and other things”
    • abbreviated to “etc”
    • not pronounced “excetera” … but honestly I wouldn’t worry about it because this is the sort of alteration the Romans would have made and did make, and language is always evolving.
    • IMO, basically a distinct English word now

    “Exempli gratia”

    • “for the sake of an example” / “for example”
    • abbreviated “eg”
    • basically a distinct English word now in the abbreviated form, pronounced “ee gee”.
    • easily substituted with a plain English translation “for example”

    “Id est”

    • “that is”
    • abbreviated “ie”
    • like the above, basically a distinct English word now, IMO.
    • easily substituted with its plain English equivalent: “that is”
      • especially given how close the Latin is to the English …. Notice how similar the two phrases sound … that’s not a coincidence, these languages are related after all.
  • Introducing Fedi Film Club
  • Yea, me too. IME, there’s always something that comes out of it. For me, it’s half of the reason for the idea.

  • Another YT Video Essay for Alien Fans (why not!?)

    About 10 mins. Focuses on some of the shooting and camera choices in Alien.

    Specifically how "dirty shots" were used ("dirty" meaning some unfocused object "dirties" up the shot) and how the 2 camera setup were used.

    I think the video was trying to make a point about how Alien was kinda "modern" in this regard. I don't know cinema theory well enough to know ... definitely interesting though!

    Either way ... it's some Alien appreciation and this little snippets are definitely good reminders of how awesome the film is.

    0
    Active communities promotion thread
  • !learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml

    It’s for learning rust (the programming language) and the lemmy code base itself as a sort of “reading club”. If you’re the type of person who might be interested there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it already. We’re currently working through The Book (conventional learning resource) through a couple of Twitch streams and regular posts/discussions.

    More collaborative learning activity is plenty welcome!

  • [Meta] Any website that could be a source of beautiful data visualizations?
  • Sorry about this. I hadn't been to the platform for a while (I was a keen early adopter when it came out).

    It seems they've locked it down more as a public platform and requires an account just to explore. So I'm not sure how useful it'd be for you.

    But there are public "notebooks" there with some attractive or interesting visualisations. EG, a quick one I found showing the confirmation votes for recent US Supreme Court Justices.

    But yea, not the resource I thought it might be (interestingly, it's a lot less of a public platform than I think there were hopes of before, but maybe that was my idealism/optimism). It is a very cool tool though!

  • I get irritated when I check out a community and there is no content on it.
  • Yea, holy shit. That’s about 4 posts a day for a straight year.

  • [Meta] Any website that could be a source of beautiful data visualizations?
  • Well there should be plenty of people’s stuff available there. At least there used to be (I haven’t been there in a while).

  • [Meta] Any website that could be a source of beautiful data visualizations?
  • Onservable HQ, if you don’t already know it. They’re likely to be interactive too.

    It’d a platform made by Bostock, who created D3.

  • Introducing Fedi Film Club

    The Idea

    • Watch and discuss movies together (kinda like a book club)
    • "Crowd source" recommendations for not-entirely-new films (IE, older than a year or so, let's say)
    • Aim for generally bettering or curating our film "diet"

    How it will work (at least at first)

    • 1 film a month
    • First, a post to take nominations/suggestions
      • Post any film you want to watch, or have heard good things about, or recommend to everyone else
    • Second, a post to take votes on the nominations
    • And then we watch and discuss the winner

    ---

    First round will start next month (July)

    Please share any thoughts/feedback, though we'll likely run this at least once first before making any changes, just to feel it out

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    Wikipedia graph for generational spans over time

    Not the prettiest graph, but a neat way of putting all this information into one image.

    Wiki Commons page: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Generation_timeline.svg#mw-jump-to-license

    Wikipedia page on Generations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation

    14
    Brandon Sanderson's theory on why the film industry is floundering (YouTube Short)
    www.youtube.com Why The Film Industry is Floundering | Intentionally Blank Ep. 151 | #brandonsanderson

    Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells theorize on what could be causing the film industry to be struggling with trying to reach their audiencesWant to send me some...

    Why The Film Industry is Floundering | Intentionally Blank Ep. 151 | #brandonsanderson

    Edit: Here's the exact same clip on the standard YouTube Watch page.

    courtesy of zagorath

    ---

    Brandon Sanderson the fantasy author

    For those uninterested in watching a youtube short (sorry), the theory is pretty simple:

    COVID and the death of theatres broke the film industry's controlled, simple and effective marketing pipeline (watch movie in theatres -> watch trailer before hand -> watch that tailer's movie in theatres ...) and so now films have the same problems books have always had which is that of finding a way to break through in a saturated market, grab people's attention and find an audience. Not being experienced with this, the film industry is floundering.

    In just this clip he doesn't mention streaming and TV (perhaps he does in the full podcast), but that basically contributes to the same dynamic of saturation and noise.

    Do note that Sanderson openly admits its a mostly unfounded theory.

    For me personally, I'm not sure how effective the theatrical trailers have been in governing my movie watching choices for a long time. Certainly there was a time that they did. But since trailers went online (anyone remember Apple Trailers!?) it's been through YouTube and online spaces like this.

    Perhaps that's relatively uncommon? Or perhaps COVID was just the straw that broke the camel's back? Or maybe there's a generational factor where now, compared to 10 years ago, the post X-Gen and "more online" demographic is relatively decisive of TV/Film sales?

    31
    Reading Club: The Book - Ownership Inventory Quiz no 1 [PROJECT]

    After Chs 5 and 6 (see the reading club post here), we get a capstone quiz that covers ownership along with struts and enums.

    So, lets do the quiz together! If you've done it already, revisiting might still be very instructive! I certainly thought these questions were useful "revision".

    ---

    I'll post a comment for each question with the answer, along with my own personal notes (and quotes from The Book if helpful), behind spoiler tags.

    Feel free to try to answer in a comment before checking (if you dare). But the main point is to understand the point the question is making, so share any confusions/difficulties too, and of course any corrections of my comments/notes!.

    0
    Reading Club: The Book Chs 5 & 6 "Structs and Enums" [PROJECT]

    Finally, we can make our own types (or data structures)!!

    ---

    This is supplementary/separate from the Twitch Streams (see sidebar for links), intended for discussion here on lemmy.

    The idea being, now that both twitch streams have read Chapters 5 and 6, we can have a discussion here and those from the twitch streams can have a retrospective or re-cap on the topic.

    This will be a regular occurrence for each discrete set of topics coming out of The Book as the twitch streams cover them

    ---

    With Ch 4 on the borrow checker out of the way, chapters 5 & 6 feel like the "inflection point" ... the point where we're ready to actually start programming in rust.

    Custom types, data structures, objects with methods, pattern matching, and even dipping into rust's traits system and it's quasi answer to class inheritance.

    If you're comfortable enough with the borrow checker, you can really start to program with rust now!

    ---

    I personally didn't think this content was difficult, though it prompts some interesting points and topics (which I'll mention in my own comment below).

    • Any thoughts, difficulties or confusions?
    • Any quizzes stump you?
    • Any major tips or rules of thumb you've taken away or generally have about using structs and enums?
    0
    Can comments in locked posts still receive votes?

    This seems to be the case from what I've seen and from a quick check just now.

    Is this intentionally so? Is it likely to remain so?

    Not that I have any problems with it. I'm just thinking about trying to run a poll through lemmy's current features (where native polls are in the roadmap anyway). And I figure, for simple polls, a bunch of comments for each option in a locked thread where people can only up vote would roughly do the trick (except that a voter would know the results ahead of time).

    0
    Thoughts on Rising?

    I only discovered the River Songs audio piece for the last few nights (it played just after sunset around the Yarra every day, bouncing sounds and singing around all the buildings around the Yarra) ... and I honestly really loved it, easily one of my favourite urban art pieces ever.

    Otherwise, I felt like this round was somewhat underwhelming and underfunded from what I saw, which feels like a trend with these White Night / Rising things ... seems like they have a ~3 year lifetime before they just dwindle to being underwhelming? But I didn't really dig into this one or see much of it. I'd guess the works along the river put a constraint on this year? But still ...

    Any thoughts? Is it something only central/inner dwellers tend to notice?

    0
    Just Watched Cloud Atlas (first time)

    I never got around to watching it when it came out, and I think I'd completely missed the critical reception and box-office failure it received. Which saddened me to read after the watch, I have to say, as I was really happy to have watched it.

    For those who don't know the film, I personally liked Roger Ebert's review (with whom I generally vibed). It was polarising, and genuinely confusing if you want to "understand" a film, while also potentially being vacuous and overwrought. I'm not going to say it was a good film or recommend it to people. If it's for you, you'll know. All I'll say is that it was, for me, a very good kind of film and generally well executed. Some ambitious film ideas and high level or broad concepts put to screen pretty full-throttle.

    I haven't seen a film in this general category of viewing experience for a while (probably entirely on me). Last probably would have been 3000 Years of Longing and maybe Twin Peaks S3 (I count that as an 18 hr film), and then Aronofsky's The Fountain (to which Cloud Atlas is probably the closest sibling I can think of).

    Without getting nostalgic about films or critical of the current era (I'm not on top of film enough to do that) ... I was certainly reminded that I need to revise my film/TV diet. It re-affirmed for me a sense that films are more powerful than TV and that this era of TV has been productionised in a way that seems to suck the art of it.

    As for what the film was actually about, I think it's much like 2001 A Space Odyssey, it's both obvious and confused/inexplicable. I'm sure there's a whole technical breakdown one could read or endeavour to create oneself, but I'm happy to have watched it once and perhaps revisit it again later to try to pick up on all of the connections I'm guessing they wove through the film, in large part because I think that's in line with the spirit of the film which I'm happy to embrace.

    ---

    Beyond all of that, but kinda connected I think, was to reminisce about the Wachowskis' career, where whatever their flaws, I think I prefer them making things to not ... there's a certain essence of good-hearted and ambitious geek-dom to their stuff that I'm just happy to watch (including Jupiter Ascending and Matrix 4).

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    Wait ... that's a hotel?!
    www.theage.com.au The Melbourne luxury hotel that needs just one thing

    Tall enough to cast a shadow over Melbourne’s Carlton Gardens, the 61-level luxury hotel is vacant despite a strong recovery in Australia’s hotel market.

    The Melbourne luxury hotel that needs just one thing
    0
    Rick Beato on AI in music

    For those who know Rick Beato, you may already have opinions one way or another. Generally I welcome his channel to YouTube.

    He has been beating this AI and "computerised music" drum for a while though. I was grateful to see him join the dots between computerised music and AI just taking over: "a computer makes better computer music than a human".

    It's a pattern I think I see in technological development. While for us or socially it may look like inflection points change everything, there is likely to be a continuous arc of technology that just happens to mean different things to us as it goes. Electrical technology for music -> electrical technological music ... was always a clear trajectory ... and that people are already accustomed to the hyper-polished "digital" sound of AI music because of the past 20 years just confirms that.

    0
    GRAYMATTER (Corridor Crew original short)

    Nicely executed VFX experiment (they have a companion video on how they did this and what their motivation was, which is interesting if you're into VFX stuff).

    5
    Is Luka actually a championship winning player (genuine question)?

    Sounds like I'm trying to be controversial, but I'm really not. Nor a Luka hater (I'm a fan). I'm just thinking out loud here ...

    It's just that watching the first two games of the finals, I can't shake the feeling that the Celtics make him look small. Not physically, but in terms of the power he has over the game, even though he's probably the best or top 2 of the players on the court.

    It just feels like being 1 way and ball heavy is too often just too much of a weakness, especially while watching Brown, Jrue and Porzingis (and even Tatum managing his slump) be impactful all over the court in ways that connect together as a team.

    Meanwhile Luka is too often getting frustrated with his shot not going down or not getting the call he wanted and clearly wanting to wait for the next offensive possession to have another go at his favourite moves (though being frustrated with his team makes sense, but TBF he's had some frustrating turn overs too).

    Like, it feels like this finals could be the beginning of a story about Luka being this mercurial and prodigious offensive player that never wanted to (or could) take care of his weaknesses enough to get a ring.

    I'm not calling it or anything ... it's just what I'm coming away from the first two games with ... in part because while the Celtics (especially with Porzingis in) are the better team I don't think they've played well and have still made it look clearly one-sided while it doesn't feel like Luka is a miraculous hero who just needs some help.

    11
    (Another) HotFuzz appreciation YouTube "Video-Essay"

    I feel like Hot Fuzz and Edgar Wright appreciation in youtube cinema critic or analysis videos are basically a meme by now (eg Every Frame a Painting did one 10 years ago ... shit I'm getting old) ...

    but I'm a fan, so give me another serving any day.

    Also this had things I didn't know about.

    Some of the visual/directing references they dig out (and simply demonstrate through video comparison) are had no idea about (however accurate/intentional they are).

    And I had no idea that Hot Fuzz is in many ways basically a remake/perfection of an indy short film Wright made as a late teen ("Dead Right" (1993), which has no wikipedia page, but seems to be up on youtube)

    and yea ... I hate the guy's voice too ... still they're the only one I've seen keeping up the "serious video essay" format well and I appreciate that a lot TBH

    1
    Are the new local-only communities also private by default?

    I'm sure this will get clarified in the release notes for 19.4, and I'm probably annoyingly jumping the gun ... I'm just curious.

    Otherwise, I find it cool to see this feature come out!

    14

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16562180

    > I'd certainly seen this exoplanet somewhere in my mainstream news world somewhere ... so nice to see a breakdown here from "Dr Becky" about how the science isn't so clear cut. > > Anyone else able to provide insight on what the possible outcomes of the newly acquired data will be?

    EDIT: what's with the downvotes? Genuinely confused ... is there some rule/culture against youtube videos or something?

    9
    maegul maegul @lemmy.ml

    A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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